Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Not really,” Eldlund said.

  “How so?” Xing asked with formal politeness.

  Callum gave his assistant a curious frown, abruptly aware that sie was nearly twice the height of the general. “Yeah. How so?”

  “There are over three thousand MHD asteroids. Firstly, to shut them down or destroy them with raids by covert personnel would be a massive operation. You’d need years to prepare, and Sol’s intelligence agencies would have spotted that level of activity among the dark operatives. Early arrests would have been inevitable, lowering the probability of overall success and even alerting us to the nature of the Olyix. Which leads to my second point. They’ve launched an armada of missiles to target defenseless MHD asteroids—a move that would seem to guarantee a one hundred percent success rate. Jessika and Soćko are both adamant the Olyix have effectively unlimited resources. As this is the method they have selected, ergo there will be no covert attack.”

  “An elegant analysis,” Xing said. “So given the entire power supply from space will be eliminated by missiles, why would they bother sabotaging Earth’s grid as well?”

  “We need a lot of power to support the food printers,” Callum said. “Without that power…”

  “Then Soćko and Jessika were right,” Eldlund said. “Earth will have to surrender. The planet simply won’t have the power to support its population.”

  “No,” Callum said forcefully. “Not on my watch. We just need time to secure new power routes in from the terraformed worlds. Which means we really need to do something about those missiles.”

  Xing inclined his head. “I am receptive to any proposals.”

  Quoek’s primary control room took Callum right back to his days at Brixton, working for Connexion’s Emergency Detoxification division. It was a large semicircular room. Desks were arranged in tiers, with operatives surrounded by hologram projections. The curving walls were all glass, fronting various specialist offices full of technicians. That older-style layout, along with the number of people on duty, made it feel a lot more reassuring than Alpha Defense’s lean Command Center.

  Standing at the back with Xing, Callum stared at the biggest screen, which was showing a view of the solar system from above the sun’s south pole: an ebony background across which sweetly circular planet orbits were etched in bold sapphire, entwined by the myriad golden threads of asteroids and comets, as if Peter Carl Fabergé had come back to craft one final masterpiece. It was being vandalized by the crimson bloodstain of missile vectors streaking out from the arkship.

  “How long until the first missile reaches an asteroid?” Callum asked.

  “Kayli, in nine hours,” Xing told him, pointing.

  Up on the screen, Kayli flashed bright emerald. The small rock had an orbit just inside Neptune’s, currently in superior conjunction on the other side of the sun, which made it the closest MHD asteroid to the Salvation of Life. Apollo splashed up its data. Three and a half kilometers along its major axis, minor orbital eccentricity, claimed by the China National Sunpower Corporation in 2169, which equipped it with six MHD chambers.

  “Does it still have a maintenance crew in situ?” Callum asked.

  “We’re evacuating them in two hours. In fact, that’s almost all we’re organizing right now.” Xing gestured around the control room. “I have a lot of people to get to safety.”

  “Okay. Before they go, I’d like to deploy a cluster of sensor satellites out of Kayli. Alpha Defense will supply them.”

  “That can be done. May I inquire why?”

  “I want to see the exact method of attack. According to my information, each of those missiles contains multiple warheads armed with nukes or antimatter. I need confirmation, and details.”

  “Of course. I will initiate that now.”

  “And which asteroid will be hit a couple of hours after Kayli?”

  “That would be Yanat. It’s one of our smaller ones, just under a kilometer in diameter.”

  “I need to go there.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to see if I can turn the asteroids into ninjas.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Too much time spent on old Hong Kong interactives when I was young. Those asteroids are actually weapons; the Olyix just haven’t realized it yet.”

  And with that Callum was reliving those old Emergency Detox days watching a disaster building on the control room displays. Senior management sweating, then deferring, while he led the team in, making assessments, calculating what equipment to take, the risks, how to deploy. Sheer exhilaration powering him along, focused so hard that the rest of the universe had faded to nothing.

  Five portals, five steps, and he was drifting into the stubby tube that bridged Yanat’s pair of zero-gee crew modules. The tiny station’s aging life support hadn’t filtered out the body smell of the two permanent crew members, and condensation slicked the walls, frosting in some places and drying up around the grimed vents. A classic tough deep-space commercial facility—hugely expensive to build originally, and gold spec-ed as well as over-engineered to chug along with nominal maintenance, so the minimum mandated function was eked out for decades. Aesthetic extravagance had no place here.

  The same could be said for its duty manager, Fang Yun. He came air-swimming out of the main module, a weary middle-aged man in a worn gray jumpsuit.

  “It’s all true, isn’t it?” he asked nervously. “The Olyix are invading. Those ships are missiles.”

  “Yes,” Callum said.

  “Cào. I hoped I’d done a bad nark at shift-start.”

  “No. Sorry, pal. It’s real.”

  “Okay, so what do you want? I got orders to help you in any way, or I don’t get to leave Yanat before the missiles arrive.”

  “Let’s not get that drastic. Where’s the control center for the MHD chambers?”

  Fang Yun blinked slowly. “No such thing. I’ve got a digital systems cubicle with some decent rez screens. The external sensors can give you good visuals, which is useful to scrutinize the maintenance bots. Apart from that, the G7Turing systems manager can splash real-time chamber data for your altme.”

  “The cubicle will do.”

  Eldlund waited out in the module’s lounge. Even in freefall, it was a squeeze for two people in the cubicle.

  So it wasn’t quite like the good old days after all. There was no heavy hardware to grapple into place, no sweating and grunting. The swearing and camaraderie of the team as they worked in unison was lacking, as was watching the solution physically come together. This was all software problems, editing the G7Turing’s safety overrides and cutoffs—procedures at which both Eldlund and Fang Yun excelled—to protect the stability that had been the absolute priority for the chambers since the whole solarwell concept was launched. Callum knew what he wanted the chamber systems to do, but his digital skills were decades out of date. Unknowing, the fate of the old had crept up on him, and now he’d become the one who provided strategy and expected others to implement it—the one they all rightly bitched about in the pub after work. When did this happen to me?

  It took hours to modify the control protocols. For all the can-do improvisation, they were dealing with plasma direct from the sun’s corona. You couldn’t just shut off every safeguard and expect things to carry on without a glitch. But finally he’d managed to call some ancient interactive software up out of Apollo’s deep cache, which the altme had coupled into the asteroid’s G7Turing. Old gaming apps could never be the final control structure, but as a proof-of-concept test, using them gave him a warm feeling of satisfaction.

  He stuck his feet to the filthy clingmat that lined most of the station’s surfaces and closed his eyes. Apollo splashed the data graphics from the MHD chamber they were using to experiment on. Showing the actual image of the plasma flow was pointless; the human eye couldn’t mak
e out the fluctuations in the stream he was hoping to manipulate.

  “Reassigning control now,” Fang Yun said, and the tone was: I can’t believe I’m doing this.

  Callum grinned as his heartbeat elevated. He was back doing what he did best: saving the world. Icons appeared in the splash as the new control routines became active. And in his mind he visualized the old games he used to play. Lone warrior poised motionless on a smoking battlefield as shrikes and demons charged forward out of the haze. Jet black samurai swords flashed out from his wrists, and he danced with grandmaster precision to take out the enemy.

  Outside the flimsy station walls, the relativistic cataract of elemental atoms blasting out of the chamber’s throat sliced sideways, just so, following the sword’s movement. “Slash and burn, pal.” Callum grinned as the dead piled up around him. “Oh, yeah.”

  There was a lot Kandara could have said about the procedure, but she held her tongue. After all, she didn’t mistrust the two Neána at this level. So she stood back and watched as drones went through the front door first, ten of them airborne and five rolling along the floor, hoisting heavier weaponry. Once they provided provisional clearance, Captain Tral nodded his approval, and Jessika stepped through.

  They’d come to Jessika’s home in Ortonia: a pleasant little coastal town, tucked away in one of the many branches of a sprawling ria. The Catalan-style house itself sat atop a gentle slope of perfectly maintained lawns, bordered by a tangle of trees. Sluggish ripples lapped at the shore below, while beyond the distant ridges the low crump of ocean breakers could be heard as they rolled into the wide sands of Fowey Bay.

  Kandara walked behind the armored figures of the squad as they entered. Like the Utopial homes she’d visited ten years before, the decor echoed the clean lines of Nordic minimalism: stone floors and gently curving white walls, pale pine furniture with deep cushions. There was even a bulbous hanging fireplace between the tall window doors of the main living room.

  Jessika stopped before a wide copper door with small rivets lining the edges. “It’s in here.”

  “Not even a secret underground hideout?” Kandara asked. “How disappointing.”

  “That’s what bad guys always use,” Jessika threw back. “Besides, the best place to hide something is in plain sight. I’m hardly the only Utopial who has a collection of home printers.”

  “I’m going to give the house network the code you provided,” Captain Tral said.

  Jessika shrugged at him. “Go for it.”

  The copper door slid open silently. Five of the airborne drones flitted in. Tral stood motionless, reviewing the sensor images they were splashing on hir tarsus lenses. A minute later, sie gestured to two of the armored squad members to enter. Both of them had a troupe of forensic drones clipped to their bandolier-style harnesses.

  “Exactly what have you been building in there?” Kandara asked.

  “Manufacturing systems, mainly,” Jessika told them. “They’ll be able to assemble weapons and tools that would be useful against the Olyix. I wanted to be ready for the elevation when it started.”

  “Weapons?” Tral asked immediately.

  “They haven’t been produced yet. I was waiting to see what would happen.” She glanced at Soćko. “Waiting to see if you would come back.”

  “So these are personal weapons?” Kandara asked. “For hand-to-hand combat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? You told us our best chance is to kiss Earth goodbye and flee.”

  “The longer it takes for them to subdue Earth, the more people can escape from the terraformed worlds into interstellar space. The weapons I can create in here were intended to equip you for guerrilla campaigns against their ground forces. But all we can ever do is slow them down.”

  “Clear,” Tral announced. “We can go in.”

  Again Kandara had to hold her tongue. Sie might have been in every meeting with Jessika, but sie clearly didn’t grasp the bigger picture. Whatever the Neána woman had assembled in her house, it was considerably more advanced than anything they’d dealt with before. She gave Jessika a half grin and rolled her eyes before gesturing at the door. Jessika responded with a quick twitch of her lips. It was interesting, this understanding they had.

  The room was large, occupying the center of the house, so it had no windows. Sophisticated printers and micro-synthesizers were stacked along one wall. The long table down the middle was scattered with odd-shaped electronic units and three processor spheres, each one with the capacity to run a G8Turing. Racks held bottles of purified chemicals and printer compounds; five tall medical-grade fridges had scarlet bio-substance symbols on the doors.

  Kandara paid little attention to the human technology. Opposite the printers was a line of meter-square cubes, their gray surfaces so smooth they were almost impossible to focus on, even when she cranked her optical peripherals up to their highest resolution. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure they were solid surfaces, they were so elusive. “And these are…?”

  “Initiators,” Jessika said. “As near as I could get, anyway.”

  “So, high-end printers?”

  “Something along those lines, sure.”

  “Stop smirking at me and explain what I’m seeing.”

  “All right.” Jessika patted the top of a cube. “They do manufacture items, like one of your printers. But the more sophisticated a machine becomes, the more elaborate its control routines.”

  “Yeah. Even I get that.”

  “An initiator’s nanoware filaments—the part that shapes molecular structures—are so complex that the control is integral by necessity, with homogenized distribution. So it’s a neural network—a very smart one.”

  “You’re telling me these things are self-aware?”

  “That’s a human philosophy. I don’t believe they have imagination. However they do have a…psychology of their own. They are kindred to the Neána.”

  Kandara put her hands on her hips, feeling her muscles tighten. “You mean only you have the access codes?”

  “No, that’s the point. There is no code to enter. They work with us because we are…simpatico. It’s not as simple as shared ancestry DNA—humans and monkeys—but we have a connection.”

  “Mother Mary! So you can’t give us this technology because you’re always the gatekeeper? We’re going to be dependent on you?”

  “No. I believe it may be possible to build initiators with a more human style of control. Once you understand the physical component of the nano filaments, you’ll want to design your own programs to run them, not use ours. Only that way will you have complete control over them. Otherwise, you will always fear some tiny bug or darkware is hidden in our routines. You already suspect that is the case with my mind, don’t you?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Exactly. So we can give you the physical component, the theory behind the mechanism. But how you utilize it, that will be down to you. For example, I doubt you will give them a mind of their own, as we do.”

  “You’re telling me you’re more trusting than humans.”

  “Would you give unlimited power of replication and assembly to an independent entity that does not share your core values? And what exactly are human core values? You are a diverse species. You will need to make a decision on that.”

  “So if I want one of your initiators to assemble a fuck-off monster gun, it won’t do it for me, but it will for you?”

  “Essentially, yes. Within an initiator, the mechanism is also the mind. If you want an initiator to construct something small and simple, like a child’s toy, then you only need a small section of the structure to do so. But for something large and complex, like a missile or creature, a correspondingly bigger section of the initiator will need to be active to facilitate the request, and the more it will be aware of what it is doing.”

 
“It judges me?”

  “A reasonable analogy, yes.”

  “Then congratulations, you were right. I want machines that simply do as they’re told.”

  “And if one of your criminals tells an obedient machine to build a nuclear warhead? Initiators are part of Neána society; they are members, equals. They would not fabricate that without a consensus.”

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about Neána society.”

  “I don’t. But I understand the psychology required by the level of technology involved. If—when—humans rise to this level, you will need to change also.”

  “I’ve heard that argument before. It’s a basic part of Utopial culture.”

  “Yeah, Jaru is one of the smart ones.”

  “Is sie Neána?”

  “Hell, no. Sie was born a long time before we arrived. Sie’s all yours.”

  “Okay, I’ll cross hir off the list.” She stared thoughtfully at the row of placid-looking cubes. “This alien zombification virus of yours. Can it be used to take control of a human mind?”

  “Theoretically, yes,” Jessika said. “The problem lies with inserting the neurovirus into the human brain. The quint neural structure has direct nerve connections that allow physical contact transfer between various components of its biotechnology systems. For a human, we’d have to design a cortical interface. But a biologic initiator should be able to construct one.”

  “Which is why we always advise the species we help never to use any kind of direct brain-computer interfaces,” Soćko said. “They make subjugation dangerously easy.”

  “So how did you get inside the Olyix transport ship’s onemind?” Kandara asked him.

  “By doing exactly that. The biostasis chamber they imprisoned me in had a multitude of neurofiber connections with the ship’s onemind. Once they hooked me up, it was a simple process to insert the neurovirus into its routines. They did the work for me.”

  “I know you, Kandara,” Jessika said. “Why does this bother you?”